Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

But naught the little town could scare;
Then, red with indignation,
He bade the herald straight repair
Up to the gates, and thunder there
The following proclamation:--
"Rascals! when I your town do take,
No living thing shall save its neck!"

Now, when the herald's trumpet sent
These tidings through the city,
To every house a death knell went;
Such murder-cries the hot air rent
Might move the stones to pity.
Then bread grew dear, but good advice
Could not be had for any price.

Then, "Woe is me!" "O misery!"
What shrieks of lamentation!
And "Kyrie Eleison!" cried
The pastors, and the flock replied,
"Lord! save us from starvation!"
"Oh, woe is me, poor Corydon--
My neck,--my neck! I'm gone,--I'm gone!"

Yet oft, when counsel, deed, and prayer
Had all proved unavailing,
When hope hung trembling on a hair,
How oft has woman's wit been there!--
A refuge never failing;
For woman's wit and Papal fraud,
Of olden time, were famed abroad.

A youthful dame, praised be her name!--
Last night had seen her plighted,--
Whether in waking hour or dream,
Conceived a rare and novel scheme,
Which all the town delighted;
Which you, if you think otherwise,
Have leave to laugh at and despise.

At midnight hour, when culverin
And gun and bomb were sleeping,
Before the camp with mournful mien,
The loveliest embassy were seen,
All kneeling low and weeping.
So sweetly, plaintively they prayed,
But no reply save this was made:--

"The women have free leave to go,
Each with her choicest treasure;
But let the knaves their husbands know
That unto them the King will show
The weight of his displeasure."
With these sad terms the lovely train
Stole weeping from the camp again.

But when the morning gilt the sky.
What happened? Give attention:--
The city gates wide open fly,
And all the wives come trudging by,
Each bearing--need I mention?--
Her own dear husband on her back,
All snugly seated in a sack!

Full many a sprig of court, the joke
Not relishing, protested,
And urged the King; but Conrad spoke:--
"A monarch's word must not be broke!"
And here the matter rested.
"Bravo!" he cried, "Ha, ha! Bravo!
Our lady guessed it would be so."

He pardoned all, and gave a ball
That night at royal quarters.
The fiddles squeaked, the trumpets blew,
And up and down the dancers flew,
Court sprigs with city daughters.
The mayor's wife--O rarest sight!--
Danced with the shoemaker that night!

Ah, where is Weinsberg, sir, I pray?
'Tis sure a famous city:
It must have cradled in its day
Full many a maid of noble clay,
And matrons wise and witty;
And if ever marriage should happen to me,
A Weinsberg dame my wife shall be.

Translated by C. T. Brooks: Reprinted from 'Representative German Poems' by the courtesy of Mrs. Charles T. Brooks.

EDMUND BURKE

(1729-1797)

BY E. L. GODKIN

Edmund Burke, born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1729, was the son of a successful attorney, who gave him as good an education as the times and the country afforded. He went to school to an excellent Quaker, and graduated at Trinity College in 1748. He appears to have then gone to London in 1750 to "keep terms," as it was called, at the Middle Temple, with the view of being admitted to the bar, in obedience to his father's desire and ambition. But the desultory habit of mind, the preference for literature and philosophical speculation to connected study, which had marked his career in college, followed him and prevented any serious application to the law. His father's patience was after a while exhausted, and he withdrew Burke's allowance and left him to his own resources.

This was in 1755, but in 1756 he married, and made his first appearance in the literary world by the publication of a book. About these years from 1750 to 1759 little is known. He published two works, one a treatise on the 'Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,' and the other a 'Vindication of Natural Society,' a satire on Bolingbroke. Stray allusions and anecdotes about other men in the diaries and correspondence of the time show that he frequented the literary coffee-houses, and was gradually making an impression on the authors and wits whom he met there. Besides the two books we have mentioned, he produced some smaller things, such as an 'Essay on the Drama,' and part of an 'Abridgment of the History of England.' But although these helped to secure him admission to the literary set, they did not raise him out of the rank of obscure literary adventurers, who from the Revolution of 1688, and especially after the union with Scotland, began to swarm to London from all parts of the three kingdoms. The first recognition of him as a serious writer was his employment by Dodsley the bookseller, at a salary of $100 a year, to edit the Annual Register, which Dodsley founded in 1769. Considered as a biographical episode, this may fairly be treated as a business man's certificate that Burke was industrious and accurate. As his income from his father was withdrawn or reduced in 1755, there remain four years during which his way of supporting himself is unknown. His published works were certainly not "pot-boilers." He was probably to some extent dependent on his wife's father, Dr. Nugent, an Irish physician who when Burke made his acquaintance lived in Bath, but after his daughter's marriage settled in London, and seems to have frequented and have been acceptable in the same coffee-houses as Burke, and for the same reasons. But Burke was not a man to remain long dependent on any one. These nine years were evidently not spent fruitlessly. They had made him known and brought him to the threshold of public life.

In 1759, political discussion as we understand it--that is, those explorations of the foundations of political society and analyses of social relations which now form our daily intellectual food--was hardly known. The interest in religion as the chief human concern was rapidly declining. The interest in human society as an organism to be studied, and if need be, taken to pieces and put together again, was only just beginning. Montesquieu's great work, 'The Spirit of the Laws,' which demanded for expediency and convenience in legislation the place which modern Europe had long assigned to authority, had only appeared in 1748. Swift's satires had made serious breaches in the wall of convention by which the State, in spite of the convulsions of the seventeenth century, was still surrounded. But the writer whose speculations excited most attention in England was Bolingbroke. The charm of his style and the variety of his interests made him the chief intellectual topic of the London world in Burke's early youth. To write like Bolingbroke was a legitimate ambition for a young man. It is not surprising that Burke felt it, and that his earliest political effort was a satire on Bolingbroke. It attracted the attention of a politician, Gerard Hamilton, and he quickly picked up Burke as his secretary, treated him badly, and was abandoned by him in disgust at the end of six years.

The peculiar condition of the English governmental machine made possible for men of Burke's kind at this period what would not be possible now. The population had vanished from a good many old boroughs, although their representation in Parliament remained, and the selection of the members fell to the lords of the soil. About one hundred and fifty members of the House of Commons were in this way chosen by great landed proprietors, and it is to be said to their credit that they used their power freely to introduce unknown young men of talent into public life. Moreover in many cases, if not in most, small boroughs, however well peopled, were expected to elect the proprietor's nominee. Burke after leaving Hamilton's service was for a short time private secretary to Lord Rockingham, when the latter succeeded Grenville in the Ministry in 1766; but when he went out, Burke obtained a seat in Parliament in 1765 in the manner we have described, for the borough of Wendover, from Lord Verney, who owned it. He made his first successful speech the same year, and was complimented by Pitt. He was already recognized as a man of enormous information, as any one who edited the Annual Register had to be.

A man of such powers and tastes in that day naturally became a pamphleteer. Outside of Parliament there was no other mode of discussing public affairs. The periodical press for purposes of discussion did not exist. During and after the Great Rebellion, the pamphlet had made its appearance as the chief instrument of controversy. Defoe used it freely after the Restoration. Swift made a great hit with it, and probably achieved the first sensational sale with his pamphlet on 'The Conduct of the Allies.' Bolingbroke's 'Patriot King' was a work of the same class. As a rule the pamphlet exposed or refuted somebody, even if it also freely expounded. It was inevitable that Burke should early begin to wield this most powerful of existing weapons. His antagonist was ready for him in the person of George Grenville, the minister who had made way for Burke's friend and patron Lord Rockingham. Grenville showed, as easily as any party newspaper in our own day, that Rockingham and his friends had ruined the country by mismanagement of the war and of the finances. Burke refuted him with a mastery of facts and figures, and a familiarity with the operations of trade and commerce, and a power of exposition and illustration, and a comprehension of the fundamental conditions of national economy, which at once made him famous and a necessary man for the Whigs in the great struggle with the Crown on which they were entering.

The nature of this struggle cannot be better described in brief space than by saying that the King, from his accession to the throne down to the close of the American War, was engaged in a persistent effort to govern through ministers chosen and dismissed, as the German ministers are now, by himself; while the subservience of Parliament was secured by the profuse use of pensions and places. To this attempt, and all the abuses which inevitably grew out of it, the Whigs with Burke as their intellectual head offered a determined resistance, and the conflict was one extraordinarily well calculated to bring his peculiar powers into play.

The leading events in this long struggle were the attempt of the House of Commons to disqualify Wilkes for a seat in the House, to punish reporting their debates as a breach of privilege, and the prosecution of the war against the American colonies. It may be said to have begun at the accession of the King, and to have lasted until the resignation of Lord North after the surrender of Cornwallis, or from 1770 to 1783.

Burke's contributions to it were his pamphlet, 'Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents,' and several speeches in Parliament: the first, like the pamphlet, on the general situation, and others on minor incidents in the struggle. This pamphlet has not only survived the controversy, but has become one of the most famous papers in the political literature of the Anglo-Saxon race. It is a century since every conspicuous figure in the drama passed away; it is seventy years since every trace of the controversy disappeared from English political life; most if not all of the principles for which Burke contended have become commonplaces of English constitutional practice; the discontents of that day have vanished as completely as those of 1630: but Burke's pamphlet still holds a high place in every course of English literature, and is still read and pondered by every student of constitutional history and by every speculator on government and political morals.

In 1774 Parliament was dissolved for the second time since Burke entered it: and there a misfortune overtook him which illustrated in a striking way the practical working of the British Constitution at that period. Lord Verney, to whom he had owed his seat for the borough of Wendover at two elections, had fallen into pecuniary embarrassment and could no longer return him, because compelled to sell his four boroughs. This left Burke high and dry, and he was beginning to tremble for his political future, when he was returned for the great commercial city of Bristol by a popular constituency. The six years during which he sat for Bristol were the most splendid portion of his career. Other portions perhaps contributed as much if not more to his literary or oratorical reputation; but this brought out in very bold relief the great traits of character which will always endear his memory to the lovers of national liberty, and place him high among the framers of great political ideals. In the first place, he propounded boldly to the Bristol electors the theory that he was to be their representative but not their delegate; that his parliamentary action must be governed by his own reason and not by their wishes. In the next, he resolutely sacrificed his seat by opposing his constituents in supporting the removal of the restrictions on Irish trade, of which English merchants reaped the benefit. He would not be a party to what he considered the oppression of his native country, no matter what might be the effect on his political prospects; and in 1780 he was not re-elected.

But the greatest achievement of this period of his history was his share in the controversy over the American War, which was really not more a conflict with the colonies over taxation, than a resolute and obstinate carrying out of the King's principles of government. The colonies were, for the time being, simply resisting pretensions to which the kingdom at home submitted. Burke's speeches on 'American Taxation' (1774), on 'Conciliation with America' (1775), and his 'Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol' (1777) on the same subject, taken as a sequel to the 'Thoughts on the Present Discontents,' form a body of literature which it is not too much to pronounce not only a history of the dispute with the colonies, but a veritable political manual. He does not confine himself to a minute description of the arguments used in supporting the attempt to coerce America; he furnishes as he goes along principles of legislation applicable almost to any condition of society; illustrations which light up as by a single flash problems of apparently inscrutable darkness; explanations of great political failures; and receipts innumerable for political happiness and success. A single sentence often disposes of half a dozen fallacies firmly imbedded in governmental tradition. His own description of the rhetorical art of Charles Townshend was eminently applicable to himself:--"He knew, better by far than any man I ever was acquainted with, how to bring together within a short time all that was necessary to establish, to illustrate, and to decorate that side of the question which he supported."

This observation suggests the great advantage he derives as a political instructor from the facts that all his political speeches and writings are polemical. The difficulty of keeping exposition from being dry is familiar to everybody who has ever sought to communicate knowledge on any subject. But Burke in every one of his political theses had an antagonist, who was literally as he says himself, a helper: who did the work of an opposing counsel at the bar, in bringing out into prominence all the weak points of Burke's case and all the strong ones of his own; who set in array all the fallacies to be exposed, all the idols to be overthrown, all the doubts to be cleared up. Moreover he was not, like the man who usually figures in controversial dialogues, a sham opponent, but a creature of flesh and blood like Grenville, or the Sheriffs of Bristol, or the King's friends, or the Irish Protestant party, who met Burke with an ardor not inferior to his own. We consequently have, in all his papers and speeches, the very best of which he was capable in thought and expression, for he had not only to watch the city but to meet the enemy in the gate.

After the close of the American War, the remainder of Burke's career was filled with two great subjects, to which he devoted himself with an ardor which occasionally degenerated into fanaticism. One was the government of India by the East India Company, and the other was the French Revolution. Although the East India Company had been long in existence, and had towards the middle of the eighteenth century been rapidly extending its power and influence, comparatively little had been known by the English public of the nature of its operations. Attention had been drawn away from it by the events in America and the long contest with the King in England. By the close of the American War, however, the "Nabobs," as they were called,--or returned English adventurers,--began to make a deep impression on English society by the apparent size of their fortunes and the lavishness of their expenditure. Burke calculated that in his time they had brought home about $200,000,000, with which they bought estates and seats in Parliament and became a very conspicuous element in English public and private life. At the same time, information as to the mode in which their money was made and their government carried on was scanty and hard to acquire. The press had no foreign correspondence; India was six months away, and all the Europeans in it were either servants of the Company, or remained in it on the Company's sufferance. The Whigs finally determined to attempt a grand inquisition into its affairs, and a bill was brought in by Fox, withdrawing the government of India from the Company and vesting it in a commission named in the bill. This was preceded by eleven reports from a Committee of Inquiry. But the bill failed utterly, and brought down the Whig ministry, which did not get into office again in Burke's time. This was followed in 1785, on Burke's instigation, by the impeachment of the most conspicuous of the Company's officers, Warren Hastings. Burke was appointed one of the managers on behalf of the Commons.

No episode in his career is so familiar to the public as his conduct of this trial, owing to Warren Hastings having been the subject of one of the most popular of Macaulay's Essays. None brought out more clearly Burke's great dialectical powers, or so well displayed his mastery of details and his power of orderly exposition. The trial lasted eight years, and was adjourned over from one Parliamentary session to another. These delays were fatal to its success. The public interest in it died out long before the close, as usual in protracted legal prosecutions; the feeling spread that the defendant could not be very guilty when it took so long to prove his crime. Although Burke toiled over the case with extraordinary industry and persistence, and an enthusiasm which never flagged, Hastings was finally acquitted.

But the labors of the prosecution were not wholly vain. It awoke in England an attention to the government of India which never died out, and led to a considerable curtailing of the power of the East India Company, and necessarily of its severity, in dealing with Indian States. The impeachment was preceded by eleven reports on the affairs of India by the Committee of the House of Commons, and the articles of impeachment were nearly as voluminous. Probably no question which has ever come before Parliament has received so thorough an examination. Hardly less important was the report of the Committee of the Commons (which consisted of the managers of the impeachment) on the Lords' journals. This was an elaborate examination of the rules of evidence which govern proceedings in the trial of impeachments, or of persons guilty of malfeasance in office. This has long been a bone of contention between lawyers and statesmen. The Peers in the course of the trial had taken the opinion of the judges frequently, and had followed it in deciding on the admissibility of evidence, a great deal of which was important to the prosecution. The report maintained, and with apparently unanswerable force, that when a legislature sits on offenses against the State, it constitutes a grand inquest which makes its own rules of evidence; and is not and ought not to be tied up by the rules administered in the ordinary law courts, and formed for the most part for the guidance of the unskilled and often uneducated men who compose juries. As a manual for the instruction of legislative committees of inquiry it is therefore still very valuable, if it be not a final authority.

Burke, during and after the Warren Hastings trial, fell into considerable neglect and unpopularity. His zeal in the prosecution had grown as the public interest in it declined, until it approached the point of fanaticism. He took office in the coalition which succeeded the Fox Whigs, and when the French Revolution broke out it found him somewhat broken in nerves, irritated by his failures, and in less cordial relations with some of his old friends and colleagues. He at once arrayed himself fiercely against the Revolution, and broke finally with what might be called the Liberty of all parties and creeds, and stood forth to the world as the foremost champion of authority, prescription, and precedent. Probably none of his writings are so familiar to the general public as those which this crisis produced, such as the 'Thoughts on the French Revolution' and the 'Letters on a Regicide Peace.' They are and will always remain, apart from the splendor of the rhetoric, extremely interesting as the last words spoken by a really great man on behalf of the old order. Old Europe made through him the best possible defense of itself. He told, as no one else could have told it, the story of what customs, precedent, prescription, and established usage had done for its civilization; and he told it nevertheless as one who was the friend of rational progress, and had taken no small part in promoting it. Only one other writer who followed him came near equaling him as a defender of the past, and that was Joseph de Maistre; but he approached the subject mainly from the religious side. To him the old regime was the order of Providence. To Burke it was the best scheme of things that humanity could devise for the advancement and preservation of civilization. In the papers we have mentioned, which were the great literary sensations of Burke's day, everything that could be said for the system of political ethics under which Europe had lived for a thousand years was said with a vigor, incisiveness, and wealth of illustration which must make them for all time and in all countries the arsenal of those who love the ancient ways and dread innovation.

The failure of the proceedings against Warren Hastings, and the strong sympathy with the French Revolution--at least in its beginning--displayed by the Whigs and by most of those with whom Burke had acted in politics, had an unfortunate effect on his temper. He broke off his friendship with Fox and others of his oldest associates and greatest admirers. He became hopeless and out of conceit with the world around him. One might have set down some of this at least to the effect of advancing years and declining health, if such onslaughts on revolutionary ideas as his 'Reflections on the French Revolution' and his 'Letters on a Regicide Peace' did not reveal the continued possession of all the literary qualities which had made the success of his earlier works. Their faults are literally the faults of youth: the brilliancy of the rhetoric, the heat of the invective, the violence of the partisanship, the reluctance to admit the existence of any grievances in France to justify the popular onslaught on the monarchy, the noblesse, and the Church. His one explanation of the crisis and its attendant horrors was the instigation of the spirit of evil. The effect on contemporary opinion was very great, and did much to stimulate the conservative reaction in England which carried on the Napoleonic wars and lasted down to the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832.

There were, however, other causes for the cloud which came over Burke's later years. In spite of his great services to his party and his towering eminence as an orator and writer, he never obtained a seat in the Cabinet. The Paymastership of the Forces, at a salary of $20,000 a year, was the highest reward, either in honor or money, which his party ever bestowed on him. It is true that in those days the Whigs were very particular in reserving high places for men of rank and family. In fact, their government was, from the Revolution of 1688 on, a thorough oligarchy, divided among a few great houses. That they should not have broken through this rule in Burke's case, and admitted to the Cabinet a man to whom they owed so much as they did to him, excited wonder in his own day, and has down to our own time been one of the historical mysteries on which the students of that period love to expend their ingenuity. It is difficult to reconcile this exclusion and neglect of Burke with the unbounded admiration lavished on him by the aristocratic leaders of the party. It is difficult too to account for Burke's quiet acquiescence in what seems to be their ingratitude. There had before his time been no similar instance of party indifference to such claims as he could well make, on such honors and rewards as the party had to bestow.

The most probable explanation of the affair is the one offered by his latest and ablest biographer, Mr. John Morley. Burke had entered public life without property,--probably the most serious mistake, if in his case it can be called a mistake, which an English politician can commit. It is a wise and salutary rule of English public life that a man who seeks a political career shall qualify for it by pecuniary independence. It would be hardly fair in Burke's case to say that he had sought a political career. The greatness of his talents literally forced it on him. He became a statesman and great Parliamentary orator, so to speak, in spite of himself. But he must have early discovered the great barrier to complete success created by his poverty. He may be said to have passed his life in pecuniary embarrassment. This alone might not have shut him out from the Whig official Paradise, for the same thing might have been said of Pitt and Fox: but they had connections; they belonged by birth and association to the Whig class. Burke's relatives were no help or credit to him. In fact, they excited distrust of him. They offended the fastidious aristocrats with whom he associated, and combined with his impecuniousness to make him seem unsuitable for a great place. These aristocrats were very good to him. They lent him money freely, and settled a pension on him, and covered him with social adulation; but they were never willing to put him beside themselves in the government. His latter years therefore had an air of tragedy. He was unpopular with most of those who in his earlier years had adored him, and was the hero of those whom in earlier years he had despised. His only son, of whose capacity he had formed a strange misconception, died young, and he passed his own closing hours, as far as we can judge, with a sense of failure. But he left one of the great names in English history. There is no trace of him in the statute book, but he has, it is safe to say, exercised a profound influence in all succeeding legislation, both in England and America. He has inspired or suggested nearly all the juridical changes which distinguish the England of to-day from the England of the last century, and is probably the only British politician whose speeches and pamphlets, made for immediate results, have given him immortality.

FROM THE SPEECH ON 'CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA'

Sir,--It is not a pleasant consideration; but nothing in the world can read so awful and so instructive a lesson as the conduct of the Ministry in this business, upon the mischief of not having large and liberal ideas in the management of great affairs. Never have the servants of the State looked at the whole of your complicated interests in one connected view. They have taken things by bits and scraps, some at one time and one pretense and some at another, just as they pressed, without any sort of regard to their relations or dependencies. They never had any kind of system, right or wrong; but only invented occasionally some miserable tale for the day, in order meanly to sneak out of difficulties into which they had proudly strutted. And they were put to all these shifts and devices, full of meanness and full of mischief, in order to pilfer piecemeal a repeal of an act which they had not the generous courage, when they found and felt their error, honorably and fairly to disclaim. By such management, by the irresistible operation of feeble counsels, so paltry a sum as Threepence in the eyes of a financier, so insignificant an article as Tea in the eyes of a philosopher, have shaken the pillars of a commercial empire that circled the whole globe.

Do you forget that in the very last year you stood on the precipice of general bankruptcy? Your danger was indeed great. You were distressed in the affairs of the East India Company; and you well know what sort of things are involved in the comprehensive energy of that significant appellation. I am not called upon to enlarge to you on that danger; which you thought proper yourselves to aggravate, and to display to the world with all the parade of indiscreet declamation. The monopoly of the most lucrative trades and the possession of imperial revenues had brought you to the verge of beggary and ruin. Such was your representation--such, in some measure, was your case. The vent of ten millions of pounds of this commodity, now locked up by the operation of an injudicious tax and rotting in the warehouses of the company, would have prevented all this distress, and all that series of desperate measures which you thought yourselves obliged to take in consequence of it. America would have furnished that vent which no other part of the world can furnish but America, where tea is next to a necessary of life and where the demand grows upon the supply. I hope our dear-bought East India Committees have done us at least so much good as to let us know that without a more extensive sale of that article, our East India revenues and acquisitions can have no certain connection with this country. It is through the American trade of tea that your East India conquests are to be prevented from crushing you with their burden. They are ponderous indeed, and they must have that great country to lean upon, or they tumble upon your head. It is the same folly that has lost you at once the benefit of the West and of the East. This folly has thrown open folding-doors to contraband, and will be the means of giving the profits of the trade of your colonies to every nation but yourselves. Never did a people suffer so much for the empty words of a preamble. It must be given up. For on what principles does it stand? This famous revenue stands, at this hour, on all the debate, as a description of revenue not as yet known in all the comprehensive (but too comprehensive!) vocabulary of finance--_a preambulary tax_. It is indeed a tax of sophistry, a tax of pedantry, a tax of disputation, a tax of war and rebellion, a tax for anything but benefit to the imposers or satisfaction to the subject....

Could anything be a subject of more just alarm to America than to see you go out of the plain high-road of finance, and give up your most certain revenues and your clearest interests, merely for the sake of insulting your colonies? No man ever doubted that the commodity of tea could bear an imposition of threepence. But no commodity will bear threepence, or will bear a penny, when the general feelings of men are irritated; and two millions of people are resolved not to pay. The feelings of the colonies were formerly the feelings of Great Britain. Theirs were formerly the feelings of Mr. Hampden when called upon for the payment of twenty shillings. Would twenty shillings have ruined Mr. Hampden's fortune? No! but the payment of half twenty shillings, on the principle it was demanded, would have made him a slave. It is the weight of that preamble of which you are so fond, and not the weight of the duty, that the Americans are unable and unwilling to bear.

It is then, sir, upon the _principle_ of this measure, and nothing else, that we are at issue. It is a principle of political expediency. Your Act of 1767 asserts that it is expedient to raise a revenue in America; your Act of 1769, which takes away that revenue, contradicts the Act of 1767, and by something much stronger than words asserts that it is not expedient. It is a reflection upon your wisdom to persist in a solemn Parliamentary declaration of the expediency of any object for which at the same time you make no sort of provision. And pray, sir, let not this circumstance escape you,--it is very material: that the preamble of this Act which we wish to repeal is not _declaratory of a right_, as some gentlemen seem to argue it; it is only a recital of the _expediency_ of a certain exercise of a right supposed already to have been asserted; an exercise you are now contending for by ways and means which you confess, though they were obeyed, to be utterly insufficient for their purpose. You are therefore at this moment in the awkward situation of fighting for a phantom, a quiddity, a thing that wants not only a substance, but even a name; for a thing which is neither abstract right nor profitable enjoyment.

They tell you, sir, that your dignity is tied to it. I know not how it happens, but this dignity of yours is a terrible incumbrance to you; for it has of late been ever at war with your interest, your equity, and every idea of your policy. Show the thing you contend for to be reason; show it to be common-sense; show it to be the means of attaining some useful end: and then I am content to allow it what dignity you please. But what dignity is derived from the perseverance in absurdity, is more than ever I could discern. The honorable gentleman has said well--indeed, in most of his _general_ observations I agree with him--he says that this subject does not stand as it did formerly. Oh, certainly not! Every hour you continue on this ill-chosen ground, your difficulties thicken on you; and therefore my conclusion is, remove from a bad position as quickly as you can. The disgrace and the necessity of yielding, both of them, grow upon you every hour of your delay....

To restore order and repose to an empire so great and so distracted as ours, is, merely in the attempt, an undertaking that would ennoble the flights of the highest genius and obtain pardon for the efforts of the meanest understanding. Struggling a good while with these thoughts, by degrees I felt myself more firm. I derived at length some confidence from what in other circumstances usually produces timidity. I grew less anxious, even from the idea of my own insignificance. For, judging of what you are by what you ought to be, I persuaded myself that you would not reject a reasonable proposition because it had nothing but its reason to recommend it. On the other hand, being totally destitute of all shadow of influence, natural or adventitious, I was very sure that if my proposition were futile or dangerous, if it were weakly conceived or improperly timed, there was nothing exterior to it of power to awe, dazzle, or delude you. You will see it just as it is; and you will treat it just as it deserves.

The proposition is Peace. Not Peace through the medium of War; not Peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations; not Peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented from principle in all parts of the empire; not Peace to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking of the shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple Peace, sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts. It is Peace sought in the spirit of Peace, and laid in principles purely pacific. I propose by removing the ground of the difference, and by restoring the _former unsuspecting confidence of the colonies in the mother country_, to give permanent satisfaction to your people; and (far from a scheme of ruling by discord) to reconcile them to each other in the same act and by the bond of the very same interest which reconciles them to British government.

My idea is nothing more. Refined policy ever has been the parent of confusion, and ever will be so, as long as the world endures. Plain good intention, which is as easily discovered at the first view as fraud is surely detected at last, is, let me say, of no mean force in the government of mankind. Genuine simplicity of heart is an healing and cementing principle. My plan, therefore, being formed upon the most simple grounds imaginable, may disappoint some people when they hear it. It has nothing to recommend it to the pruriency of curious ears. There is nothing at all new and captivating in it. It has nothing of the splendor of the project which has been lately laid upon your table by the noble lord in the blue ribbon. It does not propose to fill your lobby with squabbling colony agents, who will require the interposition of your mace at every instant to keep the peace amongst them. It does not institute a magnificent auction of finance, where captivated provinces come to general ransom by bidding against each other, until you knock down the hammer, and determine a proportion of payments beyond all the powers of algebra to equalize and settle.

The plan which I shall presume to suggest derives, however, one great advantage from the proposition and registry of that noble lord's project. The idea of conciliation is admissible. First, the House, in accepting the resolution moved by the noble lord, has admitted--notwithstanding the menacing front of our address, notwithstanding our heavy bills of pains and penalties--that we do not think ourselves precluded from all ideas of free grace and bounty.

The House has gone further: it has declared conciliation admissible, _previous_ to any submission on the part of America. It has even shot a good deal beyond that mark, and has admitted that the complaints of our former mode of exerting the right of taxation were not wholly unfounded. That right, thus exerted, is allowed to have something reprehensible in it--something unwise, or something grievous: since in the midst of our heat and resentment we of ourselves have proposed a capital alteration, and in order to get rid of what seemed so very exceptionable have instituted a mode that is altogether new; one that is indeed wholly alien from all the ancient methods and forms of Parliament.

The _principle_ of this proceeding is large enough for my purpose. The means proposed by the noble lord for carrying his ideas into execution, I think indeed are very indifferently suited to the end; and this I shall endeavor to show you before I sit down. But for the present I take my ground on the admitted principle. I mean to give peace. Peace implies reconciliation; and where there has been a material dispute, reconciliation does in a manner always imply concession on the one part or on the other. In this state of things I make no difficulty in affirming that the proposal ought to originate from us. Great and acknowledged force is not impaired, either in effect or in opinion, by an unwillingness to exert itself. The superior power may offer peace with honor and safety. Such an offer from such a power will be attributed to magnanimity. But the concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear. When such a one is disarmed, he is wholly at the mercy of his superior, and he loses forever that time and those chances which, as they happen to all men, are the strength and resources of all inferior power.

The capital leading questions on which you must this day decide are these two: First, whether you ought to concede; and secondly, what your concession ought to be. On the first of these questions we have gained (as I have just taken the liberty of observing to you) some ground. But I am sensible that a good deal more is still to be done. Indeed, sir, to enable us to determine both on the one and the other of these great questions with a firm and precise judgment, I think it may be necessary to consider distinctly the true nature and the peculiar circumstances of the object which we have before us. Because after all our struggle, whether we will or not, we must govern America according to that nature and to those circumstances, and not according to our own imaginations nor according to abstract ideas of right; by no means according to mere general theories of government, the resort to which appears to me, in our present situation, no better than arrant trifling. I shall therefore endeavor, with your leave, to lay before you some of the most material of these circumstances in as full and as clear a manner as I am able to state them.

FROM THE SPEECH ON 'THE NABOB OF ARCOT'S DEBTS'

That you may judge what chance any honorable and useful end of government has for a provision that comes in for the leavings of these gluttonous demands, I must take it on myself to bring before you the real condition of that abused, insulted, racked, and ruined country, though in truth my mind revolts from it; though you will hear it with horror: and I confess I tremble when I think on these awful and confounding dispensations of Providence. I shall first trouble you with a few words as to the cause.

The great fortunes made in India in the beginnings of conquest naturally excited an emulation in all the parts, and through the whole succession, of the company's service. But in the company it gave rise to other sentiments. They did not find the new channels of acquisition flow with equal riches to them. On the contrary, the high flood-tide of private emolument was generally in the lowest ebb of their affairs. They began also to fear that the fortune of war might take away what the fortune of war had given. Wars were accordingly discouraged by repeated injunctions and menaces; and that the servants might not be bribed into them by the native princes, they were strictly forbidden to take any money whatsoever from their hands. But vehement passion is ingenious in resources. The company's servants were not only stimulated but better instructed by the prohibition. They soon fell upon a contrivance which answered their purposes far better than the methods which were forbidden; though in this also they violated an ancient, but they thought an abrogated, order. They reversed their proceedings. Instead of receiving presents, they made loans. Instead of carrying on wars in their own name, they contrived an authority, at once irresistible and irresponsible, in whose name they might ravage at pleasure; and being thus freed from all restraint, they indulged themselves in the most extravagant speculations of plunder. The cabal of creditors who have been the object of the late bountiful grant from His Majesty's ministers, in order to possess themselves, under the name of creditors and assignees, of every country in India as fast as it should be conquered, inspired into the mind of the Nabob of Arcot (then a dependent on the company of the humblest order) a scheme of the most wild and desperate ambition that I believe ever was admitted into the thoughts of a man so situated. First, they persuaded him to consider himself as a principal member in the political system of Europe. In the next place they held out to him, and he readily imbibed, the idea of the general empire of Indostan. As a preliminary to this undertaking, they prevailed on him to propose a tripartite division of that vast country--one part to the company; another to the Mahrattas; and the third to himself. To himself he reserved all the southern part of the great peninsula, comprehended under the general name of the Deccan.

On this scheme of their servants, the company was to appear in the Carnatic in no other light than as a contractor for the provision of armies and hire of mercenaries, for his use and under his direction. This disposition was to be secured by the Nabob's putting himself under the guarantee of France, and by the means of that rival nation preventing the English forever from assuming an equality, much less a superiority, in the Carnatic. In pursuance of this treasonable project (treasonable on the part of the English), they extinguished the company as a sovereign power in that part of India; they withdrew the company's garrisons out of all the forts and strongholds of the Carnatic; they declined to receive the ambassadors from foreign courts, and remitted them to the Nabob of Arcot; they fell upon, and totally destroyed, the oldest ally of the company, the king of Tanjore, and plundered the country to the amount of near five millions sterling; one after another, in the Nabob's name but with English force, they brought into a miserable servitude all the princes and great independent nobility of a vast country. In proportion to these treasons and violences, which ruined the people, the fund of the Nabob's debt grew and flourished.

Among the victims to this magnificent plan of universal plunder, worthy of the heroic avarice of the projectors, you have all heard (and he has made himself to be well remembered) of an Indian chief called Hyder Ali Khan. This man possessed the western, as the company under the name of the Nabob of Arcot does the eastern, division of the Carnatic. It was among the leading measures in the design of this cabal (according to their own emphatic language) to _extirpate_ this Hyder Ali. They declared the Nabob of Arcot to be his sovereign, and himself to be a rebel, and publicly invested their instrument with the sovereignty of the kingdom of Mysore. But their victim was not of the passive kind. They were soon obliged to conclude a treaty of peace and close alliance with this rebel at the gates of Madras. Both before and since that treaty, every principle of policy pointed out this power as a natural alliance; and on his part it was courted by every sort of amicable office. But the cabinet council of English creditors would not suffer their Nabob of Arcot to sign the treaty, nor even to give to a prince at least his equal the ordinary titles of respect and courtesy. From that time forward, a continued plot was carried on within the divan, black and white, of the Nabob of Arcot, for the destruction of Hyder Ali. As to the outward members of the double, or rather treble, government of Madras, which had signed the treaty, they were always prevented by some over-ruling influence (which they do not describe but which cannot be misunderstood) from performing what justice and interest combined so evidently to enforce.

When at length Hyder Ali found that he had to do with men who either would sign no convention, or whom no treaty and no signature could bind, and who were the determined enemies of human intercourse itself, he decreed to make the country possessed by these incorrigible and predestinated criminals a memorable example to mankind. He resolved, in the gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things, to leave the whole Carnatic an everlasting monument of vengeance, and to put perpetual desolation as a barrier between him and those against whom the faith which holds the moral elements of the world together was no protection. He became at length so confident of his force, so collected in his might, that he made no secret whatsoever of his dreadful resolution. Having terminated his disputes with every enemy and every rival, who buried their mutual animosities in their common detestation against the creditors of the Nabob of Arcot, he drew from every quarter whatever a savage ferocity could add to his new rudiments in the arts of destruction; and compounding all the materials of fury, havoc, and desolation into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of the mountains. Whilst the authors of all these evils were idly and stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor, which blackened all their horizon, it suddenly burst and poured down the whole of its contents upon the plains of the Carnatic. Then ensued a scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants, flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacredness of function,--fathers torn from children, husbands from wives,--enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity in an unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest fled to the walled cities: but escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the jaws of famine.

The alms of the settlement in this dreadful exigency were certainly liberal, and all was done by charity that private charity could do: but it was a people in beggary; it was a nation which stretched out its hands for food. For months together these creatures of sufferance,--whose very excess of luxury in their most plenteous days had fallen short of the allowance of our austerest fasts,--silent, patient, resigned, without sedition or disturbance, almost without complaint, perished by an hundred a day in the streets of Madras; every day seventy at least laid their bodies in the streets, or on the glacis of Tanjore, and expired of famine in the granary of India. I was going to awake your justice towards this unhappy part of our fellow-citizens by bringing before you some of the circumstances of this plague of hunger. Of all the calamities which beset and waylay the life of man, this comes the nearest to our heart, and is that wherein the proudest of us all feels himself to be nothing more than he is: but I find myself unable to manage it with decorum; these details are of a species of horror so nauseous and disgusting, they are so degrading to the sufferers and to the hearers, they are so humiliating to human nature itself, that on better thoughts I find it more advisable to throw a pall over this hideous object, and to leave it to your general conceptions.

For eighteen months without intermission this destruction raged from the gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore; and so completely did these masters in their art, Hyder Ali and his more ferocious son, absolve themselves of their impious vow, that when the British armies traversed, as they did, the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole line of their march they did not see one man, not one woman, not one child, not one four-footed beast of any description whatever. One dead uniform silence reigned over the whole region. With the inconsiderable exceptions of the narrow vicinage of some few forts, I wish to be understood as speaking literally;--I mean to produce to you more than three witnesses, above all exception, who will support this assertion in its full extent. That hurricane of war passed through every part of the central provinces of the Carnatic. Six or seven districts to the north and to the south (and those not wholly untouched) escaped the general ravage.